Reason's Developing Self-Revelation

This book, the third of four in a series, coming after New Hegelian Essays, demonstrating how Hegel’s philosophy perfects the rational presentation of any and all religious representation, and its successor From Narrative to Necessity, showing the coincidence of the doctrines of Trinity, Creation and Incarnation with the humanist ideal, expounds religion, and Christianity in particular, as continuous unfolding in history of Reason’s Developing Self-Revelation, latterly in the crucible of Absolute Idealism, which is philosophy proper. A fourth book, on Hegel’s contribution to the reconciliation of cultures, explores the implications of Hegel’s thought for any possible ecumenism.Meanwhile, this third book opens with three chapters freeing Christian orthodoxy from all figurative representation, showing the connection with Hegel’s treatment of the logical forms under the heading of “The Subjective Notion” (see New Hegelian Essays, chapter seventeen) in his system of Logic. The book then progresses through several chapters of Hegelian Logic and metaphysics, concerning concepts of the self-explanatory, the one and the many, absolute simplicity, and coming, among other related topics, to a discussion of evolution philosophically viewed in relation to our knowledge and its possibility. By this route we come to a final question and chapter, “Christianity without (or within) God?” As God has to be self-determining, he cannot be given any finite name, but is the Absolute (loosed from all things, literally), or Pure Act, which is also, Idealism demonstrates, the Absolute Idea specifically. It follows that “Idea” adds no qualification to “Absolute”, since there is, by its concept, nothing outside of the latter, not even we ourselves. We are images and signs thereof, differentiated from it but not other than it.